Cursed
by Louise24601
Summary: In Italy 1783, Elena Gilbert has been committed to a convent, as she claims she has been hearing the voice of the devil for the past three months. But when a young man called Stefan Salvatore comes to take her away, he informs her the voice that has been haunting her is not the devil's, but that of a man of flesh and blood very much determined to lead her to damnation. D/E story.
1. Chapter 1

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."

Elena's eyes remained set on the small rosary in her hands. Focusing on the familiar feel of the wooden beads against her fingers, trying to find comfort in the silence that filled the small attic where she had been an inmate for the past three months, and which was empty but for an iron bed and a chair and table where she could write.

On her knees, facing the window, Elena spoke again the words that only herself and these four walls could bear witness to.

No priest had been by to listen to her confession since her arrival to the convent.

No one at all would see her – which was understandable.

She supposed that, all things considered, she should feel lucky that the nuns tolerated her presence, that they would bother to slide a meagre portion of bread beneath her door day after day, instead of driving her from the convent. In the wilderness, alone, given the state she was in, she would last maybe a week – probably less.

Sometimes, she caught bits and pieces of their gossips as the women walked past her room. It didn't happen often. Virtually no one had any business upstairs, where there was no other lodger, only Elena –

What she would do for a companion, for a voice other than her own filling the room.

Those same words she heard spoken, over and again – she hardly knew what else to say.

"Forgive me father, for I have sinned."

It was no use going any further than that. God alone could hear her now, and God needed no word from her to know who she had sinned against.

"It has been three months now, since I first heard His voice. It holds the same terrors now as it did then. Every night, still, I hear it. I know it is the voice of the devil, but I cannot chase it – I cannot."

Mad screams wrenched her from sleep, night after night, however hard she fought against it. Though Elena struggled and prayed for her savior's strength, though she resisted, still it came for her, black as midnight, the voice of temptation, entering her dreams like a knife enters the flesh, so her weaknesses would lie bleeding and exposed.

_My sweet Elena_, It said.

_There's no use in this brave resistance_. _You think those fences in your mind can keep me from you? You think the walls of a convent can keep me from you?_

It laughed.

_I wouldn't stop at an army of angels_, _I wouldn't stop if you were locked in a tower beyond the gates of heaven._

She knew this to be true.

"You're cursed," her father had said when he'd seen her, sobbing that first night, with fear and shock, when she first experienced the dreams – when she first heard His voice.

And cursed was the best word for what she felt that she could think of.

Curses were forever, weren't they – with luck, they might end with death.

"When I am dead," she thought, "they'll seal this room for fear I'll haunt it."

Suddenly, there was the sound of footsteps up the flight of stairs that led to her attic room.

Elena gasped and tightened her hold on the rosary.

"Don't torment yourself," she said to scold the very hopes that were rising in her chest. "They're not here for you. They'll keep just keep walking down the corridor as they always do."

She knew they were not here to give her the daily share of bread and water, because those had been delivered earlier, before dawn. They preferred to give the food while she was asleep, as if they feared to hear from her a mere _Thank you_.

Because she was haunted by a demon, they treated Elena herself as a demon.

But the footsteps stopped at the level of her door. The young woman's breath was trapped in her mouth, like a thin thread of ice. Her own heartbeat, deafening, at her temples. Her grip so tight on the rosary she could feel the beads biting into her flesh.

"Are you decent, Elena?"

Elena recognized the voice of Sister Maria, the woman who usually communicated with her, on the rare occasions when it did happen. The other women here did not speak English. It was this same woman who had met with her when her parents had brought her here, three months ago, and promised a large sum in exchange for board and shelter for their daughter.

That same voice that had been pregnant with judgment, and with the very fire burning in her eyes, as she said, "You are the girl, then, who claims the devil is trying to seduce you?"

Elena had been unable to answer, dazed by the sheer power of the woman's disgust – how hate blazed in every fiber of that holy-dressed body, hate for the devil, no doubt, legitimate hate, but Elena had crumbled still under its weight.

Now, three months later, the girl swallowed, struggling to find her voice for her moment. It had been a long time since she had spoken to anyone but herself. "Yes."

"There is a holy man to see you. We have warned him of your condition. He will try to help."

"What? But how –"

"Will you see him, Elena?" The voice sharp through the door. "He has come a long way."

Elena pressed her hands to her forehead, for courage, for strength.

How would anyone have heard of her, how would they have come all the way here, through the infinite stretches of wilderness that surrounded the convent? Her parents themselves would have told no one of what had happened to her. Probably, by now, everyone in her native village, in England, thought Elena was dead. And anyway, there was no one there who would have cared enough about her to cross the channel to France before traveling all the way down to Italy, where Elena was presently confined.

Curiosity was raging strong within her. If it had not gotten the better of her, then it would have been the sheer desire to speak to someone, to see another soul in this room who might look on her with mercy.

"Yes," she said, "yes, I will see him."

A short wait followed her pledge of consent.

Soon afterwards, the door to her attic room was opened, and a young man, dressed in a black religious habit, stepped in.

His youth actually surprised Elena more than she let on. Throughout her life, all the religious men she had known had been wrinkled and grey, which had somehow lent a more authoritative dimension to their Bible-based warnings.

But the man now standing in front of her hardly looked older than seventeen. With chestnut-colored curls and strikingly handsome features, the young man looked, she thought, more like an angel than a priest.

Elena felt her courage cower under the stare of his direct green gaze and lowered her eyes to her hands, still tightly clutching the rosary.

"Rise, Elena." He said.

His voice was the gentlest, heavenliest sound she had ever heard.

Before she could muster the strength for a reply, he extended a kind, large-palmed hand, which she could only look on in startle.

"I won't have you kneeling in front of me."

Though Sister Maria had introduced him as Signor Salvatore, he spoke perfect English, without even the mildest trace of an accent.

Elena shivered at the touch of his hand. Not only because it was her first human contact in three months, or the first time, in fact, that a young man touched her – but because his hand was very cold.

"Who are you?" She asked.

Not because she doubted him.

Somehow, the truth of his extraordinary kindness had immediately defeated any of the cautious barriers she might have raised against him.

"I came here a friend."

"But –"

"Elena," he said, once he had helped her rise to his level.

Her head was spinning, maybe from faintness – she had been living on bread and water for three months – but part of her felt the cause lay deeper.

Three months ago, her parents had ridden away with her in the middle of the night to the wildest regions of Europe, looking for a place holy enough that might balance with the terrible curse she seemed to bear. Then, as she glimpsed bits and pieces of the landscape through the window of the horse-drawn carriage, Elena had known her whole life was changing forever –

Now, with her hand wrapped in the strikingly cold touch of that young man, she felt her world had started spinning once again, and she could not tell where it would stop or in what state it would leave her.

"I realize how sudden and strange this must seem to you." The young man said. "And though you have no reason to trust me yet – I'm asking you to."

His eyes conveyed the urgency of his demand.

"Tonight, the nuns have arranged for a man to come here and take you away. He has paid them a lot of money in exchange for having complete guardianship over you. I've managed to convince them that I was that man, and that I'd arrived early. The man they were waiting, they knew only as Signor Salvatore, and I've shown them papers that identified me as such."

"You mean you deceived Sister Maria –"

"Please." He interrupted, perhaps missing out on the fact that, through her shock, Elena was more admirative than frightened. "We have little time. The man who wants to take you, the other Salvatore, is the man you've been hearing, Elena."

Then, the young woman did feel afraid.

The sensation speared through her ribcage and into her chest, attacking all that was deepest inside her.

The mere evocation of her tormentor – the thought alone of the voice that haunted her most private thoughts – was like an invasion by an alien, freezing cold wave of water, one that not only soaked but burned.

Elena spoke through clenched teeth. "How could you possibly know –"

"You must trust that I do," he said. "You must trust that the voice you have been hearing is not the devil's – but that it doesn't belong to any human being, either. Especially, Elena, you _must_ trust that if you don't come with me, right now, this creature _will_ find you. And he will lead you to damnation."

Elena was still for a moment, rather out of brute shock than actual hesitation.

The young man clutched her hand in his, and through that touch, she could feel the urgency of their situation.

"Are you with me, Elena? Will you trust me to keep you safe from the beast?"

There was an old man in Elena's native village who begged for alms, and who always thanked her for the little she had to give him with a, _Bless you, bless you child, and may God save you from the Tiger_.

Elena had never known exactly what he meant by that word – the Tiger – except that it wasn't the fantastic black-streaked animal you read about in children's books.

But since the Voice had started speaking to her, she had felt sometimes, inexplicably, that that's what she was hearing.

The Tiger.

Whatever the old man meant by it.

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Sweet lord, how cold his hands felt upon hers, but he soon gave her a smile kind enough to make her forget it.

"Then follow me."

They left the convent in what felt like a minute's time – how it all whirled by Elena's dazed mind, like fogged images you see in a dream.

"So quickly?" Sister Maria inquired after them as Signor Salvatore – she learned his name was _Stefan_ – led her away. "Will you not breakfast with us, sir? Are you quite sure she's in a condition for such a journey?"

"I'm sure she's in the fittest condition which your benevolence and charity have allowed."

There was a sharpness to his tone which was new to Elena's ears. The mellow, honey-voice that had coaxed her into blind trust, in the attic room, felt all the more dream-like.

Somehow, Elena felt sure a man as religious as the habit Stefan wore suggested would not speak to a Sister with such inner coldness, even wrapped as it was in the most courteous dress.

"Thank you, but no. We'll have breakfast when we stop at the nearest town."

"But that's hours away –"

"Thank you, Sister."

The ice in his voice indicated he could guess well enough that Elena had gone without breakfast, in fact, without proper food, throughout her entire stay.

Still, there was that deep-grounded kindness that was more than a layer – that seemed, somehow, to mirror the man's soul.

"I'm afraid we must be on our way."

Elena caught the natural reticence on Sister Maria's face.

Had a sudden guilt stricken her, when it became clear that she was actually selling her away, or did Elena's miseries all seem plainer when she was a face and body, and not merely a voice in an attic room, a ghost of a girl haunting this convent with her dreadful dreams?

"Goodbye, Elena."

"Goodbye, Sister."

Outside, the air tasted of warmth and wilderness, but she caught only a glimpse of the woods ahead, barely had time to look past her shoulder and take one last image of the convent with her, erect and frightening with the awesomeness of God, before Stefan led her into the horse-drawn carriage that was waiting for them outside.

"It's all right," Stefan said once they were alone. "You're safe now."

Yet Elena had never felt farther away from home, or more helpless in the hands of fate, than now.


	2. Sweet Dreams

Elena didn't struggle against sleep when it came, a white blanket of snow, lowering over her face. Stefan had told her this would be a long trip, several hours before they got to their destination. It wasn't immediately after they left the convent that the full blow of exhaustion came down on her, and she realized just how worn and empty of strength she was.

Her stay at Sister Maria's convent had been like a long winter night.

But excitement kept her alert at first. Drawing aside the thick red drape that covered the small window in their carriage, Elena peered at the outside world that had been out of her reach for months.

Oh, the sight of nature, the brown patches of earth their wheels rolled quickly past, the leafless branches that seemed to reach out for her, brushing against the carriage.

As the miles flew by, and the convent became more and more concretely a thing of the past, the outline of Elena's imprisonment emerged sharper into the contrasting freedom of the pearl sky where she fixed her gaze presently, and she realized just how she had been ready to die in that attic room, to never see more of the world than those wooden walls.

How she had resignedly said goodbye to human kindness, really, to all human contact save for the barks of the sisters when it was necessary for them to speak to her.

"Here," Stefan said, drawing her out of her awed contemplation of the woods into which their carriage was steadily sinking.

Elena had been too absorbed to see him pull out a basket from beneath their seat. Inside, there were two round pieces of white bread, nothing like the stale hard chunks the sisters would slip through the opening in Elena's attic door, but looking wondrous soft, like clouds. Oranges, whose near-red shade hinted at their juiciness, and a small pot of marmalade glowing amber like a stolen treasure; Elena had never tasted any before.

"Please, have some."

Elena saw her own tentative hand palely reaching for the inside of the basket.

Manners alone weren't what stopped her from outright devouring the food. True, she had been brought up in a severe household, where children were not to touch the goods reserved for more deserving people. The best food Elena ever saw on her table was when the rector came to visit them at breakfast, once a month, and then, she and her brother were only allowed to look at the tasty dishes on display, which were destined, their mother said, to the holiest man they knew.

But Elena used to think, as the elderly man munched down the pieces of buttered bread, boiled eggs and rich milk, that this mouth did not really look holy to her, and hers and her brother's must be terribly irreligious if they were so much below the rector's as her mother upheld.

That morning, alone in a phaeton with a man she didn't know, Elena hardly dared to accept the food he offered, and when she did dare, found that her stomach hardened like a rock at the first mouthfuls.

Her body had grown accustomed to hunger, so that anything more than what had been her daily lot for months now seemed a painful excess.

"Will you not eat?" She asked.

The question sounded rude when she heard it out loud – in truth, the sound of her own voice had acquired a kind of transgressive insolence, after all those months in silence, but Stefan seemed not to notice.

He shook his head without further explanation.

It took Elena maybe twenty minutes just to go through with one piece of bread. When the food had lost her attention, and the pain in her tummy was only mildly distracting, it occurred to her how funny this all looked.

Like one of those stories she'd heard by some of the elderly women in the village, about children being stolen by the fairies. The fairies always appeared in such horse-drawn carriages as she and Stefan were in now. They were either outrageously beautiful or repulsive to look at.

"And mind you don't eat their food!" The warning was always the same one.

But, even after all that had happened to her, Elena wasn't yet superstitious enough that she would think the young man had come to steal her away into some unknown fairy kingdom.

"You're not really a priest, are you?" She wondered.

Stefan smiled.

The black habit on him looked like a disguise, now that they were riding away from the convent, the black wool cloaked around his shoulders, contrasting somewhat with the ice-whiteness of his young face.

"No. I had to find a way to be let in, to take you away from this place."

Elena almost asked, _Why_? But felt in the end whatever answer he gave would not be satisfying.

She had long learned the pointlessness of asking this one question in particular.

Did God answer Job when he asked him that?

What could it even mean, why, when Elena's whole life had felt like a doomed game of chance, ever since that Voice had pierced the gate of her dreams – a game of hide and seek when the other player always knew where she thought of hiding, when there was never any chance to escape him.

"Are you an angel?"

Stefan laughed. The sound was a miracle of warmth and life, yet not quite humanness, to Elena's ears.

"Why would you ask me that?"

"I don't know. If you're not, I can't think of what you are.

"No," he agreed, and his face looked graver. "You better not."

"How did you know? About the creature that speaks to me? About the Voice?"

His gaze lowered toward the floor of the carriage. "It's, uh – it's going to be a long journey, Elena. Perhaps you should try and rest."

"But I don't –"

She was going to say she didn't feel tired, when she felt the weight of sleep suddenly taunt her eyelids, like a thick mist falling heavily over her eyes, crushing, spellbinding.

Stefan had looked up at her.

The kindness of his face, so young – too young to be a priest, or anything human, really, that could agree with the old sadness in his eyes, the unspeakable suffering.

"I'm sorry. You'll feel better," he said, "once you've had some sleep."

…

That was not the truth, of course, Stefan knew.

As he watched the delicately-breathing girl, spread motionless on the seat of the carriage, he was ever-aware that his efforts to give her a quiet moment of reprieve could only hope to compete with the violent thrust of the creature that had been invading her mind for months.

"Damon," he whispered, as if to speak the name of his brother would weaken his aura of mystical, all-powerful agency.

It was pointless to try and reason with him.

Their last conversation was the lasting proof of that.

Of all the things Damon had done, in his long nightly existence of savage lust for blood and innocence, Stefan didn't think there was a worse crime than this one – the one he still had some hope to prevent.

"Why?" He had asked Damon, when the latter sat smiling in his chamber – the stolen rooms of a family he had put under his spell. "Do you hear me, Damon?"

But his brother had only kept his eyes on the ceiling, with that deviousness animating his handsome face.

"You have no right, you know."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, brother, is it time for another one of your lectures? The last one was – wait, don't tell me. I'd swear it was only last month."

He got to his feet, and Stefan saw that he was holding something in his hands – something like a shawl, brown, unextraordinary, even unattractive, if it wasn't for the last remnants of sweet fragrance that remained imbedded in the woolen fabric.

It had been a month, by then, that Damon had first caught glimpse of the girl in a forgettable English village, and had decided that the sight of her would set his blood aflame, send his mind raving.

What a tedious, terrible task it was to be cursed with such an immortal brother that Stefan always found himself trying to right his wrongs, to erase the violent trauma of his passage, wherever they went.

From the most unknown regions of the world to the rural south of England, Damon would sow nothing but destruction. It wasn't enough that both brothers were bound to devour human lives to maintain their doomed, colorless existence. Damon actually took pleasure in those acts of sin: the naked throat of a blooming girl not only made his mouth water, it twisted it into a voracious grin.

Since the brothers had been made to bear the vampire curse, while Stefan retrenched ever deeper into the dark recesses of penitence and guilt, all that remained of his humanity, Damon had gleefully chosen the opposite pathway. Never did he fail to laugh at his brother when he caught him crawling in his chamber, clawing at the floor with bottomless want. Damon soared higher, ever higher than all the rest of the world, having completely given up on whatever longings might have clawed at him and troubled the apotheosis of his humanity-deprived soul.

"You are something, I'll give you that." Damon said, his fingers mindlessly toying with the scarf, on which the girl's scent was barely a memory now, something you needed to recreate fragment by fragment. "How many times have we been over this? My way of life disgusts you, you hate me? So. Leave me. I'm hardly keeping you chained to my side, am I? No, I'm serious Stefan. Take a break from me. Go on holiday! See the world," he laughed, his shining white smile sending a shiver through Stefan's body. "Find yourself a pretty human mistress, hunger after her and torment yourself even more – that's all you like to do, isn't it? Don't blame me because I don't wish to join your self-flagellating party."

Stefan drew in a long intake of air. No matter that he did not really need the air, now, that it only participated in the simulacrum of life that kept his body alive-looking.

"You have no right," he reiterated, "to torment this young girl."

"Oh, haven't I?" His brother feigned surprise, clutching the shawl closer like a child caught red-handed – red-handed, Damon certainly was. "Are you my judge, baby brother? Are you to delineate my rights, to make me sit in a tribunal when I _violate_ your precious rules? This isn't America."

He pressed the shawl to his mouth and closed his eyes, and Stefan was barely surprised he would give way to such a carnal want in his presence. His eyelids creased as he lost himself in the reconstruction of the girl's aroma, whose scent, whose smile, had penetrated Damon's flesh and bones deeper than anything ever had, only as deep, Stefan believed, as Jesus Christ can enter the souls of Christians.

"And how would you know, huh?" Damon said, when he had raised his face from the shawl. "If you haven't been there to see her yourself, Stefan, how would you know that the girl is going through my relentless torments – that she can't eat or sleep or go to church, can't do anything but _weep_ because I'm filling her mind so full, there's no room left whatsoever for sanity. You know what I think? You envy me, Stefan. You hate me, because I do all the things you don't let yourself do. I want the girl, and I'll take her." He shrugged. "All you can do is whine like a loveless dog outside her bedroom window."

"Her parents are treating her like a prisoner," he said. He had long stopped hoping to awaken his brother's mercy for any being in the world, and yet, he heard himself renew the attempt, revive the old hope, like a devout man trying to convert a heathen. "They're saying she's cursed."

"Mmm," Damon was looking at the shawl again, a plain brown patch, but even cloaked inside it, the girl's beauty had gleamed and reached to their eyes like sharpened diamonds. A face that painters would have sold their souls to see even as a mirage in their dreams, that it might inspire half the beauty it effortlessly signified. The sort of face that made you believe in losing your wits overnight, the sort of face that could stop or start a war.

The brothers were not old enough that they had had the privilege of looking on Helen of Troy. But Stefan thought, if the myth held any truth, it must have been a face like this one.

"I think they're right," Damon sighed.

A sound, like a muted howl, passed Stefan's lips. "Damon –"

"Oh, leave me be, Stefan!" His brother spoke in actual annoyance. His patience, though increased in his immortal life, still wore thin every once in a while. "Honestly. Go on a journey, somewhere far away from here. Curse me with your righteous hate, swear never to see me more, and come back to me when loneliness is driving you half insane. I swear, I won't mind it if I don't see you for another ten years."

Stefan had known from that moment it was pointless to keep up this argument, that burned ruthlessly between he and his brother, and that would keep burning, no matter how hard Stefan wished otherwise.

All he could do, he thought, was bring comfort to his brother's victim, somehow, the poor girl who had not even seen them, that day, at the village, who knew herself to be an object of tyrannical want no more than she knew of the existence of vampires and witches beyond the realm of folklore.

_If Damon can enter her mind, then so can I. If he can bring torment, maybe I can bring peace_.

But Damon was stronger than himself, of course, as he gorged on human lives with an ogre's appetite, while Stefan contented himself with animals, and only took the amount that was absolutely necessary for him to stay alive.

Or however you would call what he was.

In any case, soon after this conversation, the girl's parents had had her shipped away to a convent, lord only knew where; the villagers had plenty ideas to share with any newcomer, but most only led the brothers on the wrong tracks. By this time, Damon was getting riled enough to rip the head off of anyone unfortunate enough to taunt his increasingly thinning patience.

When the theories of 'convent' and 'Italy' had emerged clearly enough, the Salvatore brothers had thrown themselves after her, Damon eager, and groaning like a beast every night – _They think they can keep me away from her, can they? Well, I still feel her. She still feels ME_.

And Stefan, pretending to be pacified.

He couldn't say when he had decided he would betray his brother, and launch himself in an attempt to steal Elena back to safety.

Right now, as he watched her sleeping in the carriage, as he watched without restraint the beauty that had driven his brother mad with desire, he thought that surely, 'safety' was still a very remote ideal.

The tiger was still on their tracks.

Close behind them, maybe closer even than Stefan feared.

It was a dangerous wilderness to be thrown into, for a young girl barely seventeen.

And of course, he could never explain to her that his brother was no more a devil than he himself was an angel, that they were just one flesh and blood under the same curse, and that in them both, there was an animal hunger that could be stopped but not destroyed, and that lusted after her.

"Sweet dreams, Elena," he whispered. "And may heaven have mercy on us."

…

**End Notes**: I've really enjoyed writing this chapter. Please share your thoughts and reactions.


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